One summer day, two well-mounted German officers, probably attending the Kaiser or making arrangements for his usual yachting trip to Norway, came along a country road. They were splendid looking creatures, voluminously cloaked—a wind was blowing—helmets glittering. Our car had stopped on a side road; something was wrong. A peasant, manipulating two great pine stems on a low, two-wheeled cart, had barred the main road, and, as the noontide had come, sat down to eat his breakfast. One of the officers haughtily commanded him to clear the way, expecting evidently a frightened obedience. The peasant put his hands in his pockets and said,—'Mr. Man, I will move my logs when I can. First, I must eat my breakfast, you can jump your horses over my logs; why not? Jump!'
The officer made a movement to draw his revolver; the Norwegian only laughed.
'Besides,' he said, 'there is a wheel half off my cart; I cannot move it quickly.'
The language of the officers was terrifying. Finally, they were compelled to jump. Neither the sun glittering on the fierce eagles nor the curses of the officers moved this amiable man; he drank peacefully from his bottle of schnapps and munched his black bread and sausage as if their great persons had never crossed his path, or, rather, he theirs.
Neither art, literature nor music has been Germanised in Norway. Art, of later years, has been touched by the French ultra-impressionists. There is no humble home in the mountains that does not know Grieg. And why? When you know Grieg and know Norway, you know that Grieg is Norway.
Norway is the land of the free and the home of the brave. There was no fear that German ideas would control it, and the Prussians knew this. What is good in German methods of education the Norwegians adopt, but they first make them Norwegian.
CHAPTER VII
THE RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA
Machiavelli, in The Prince, instructs rulers in the use of religion as a means of obtaining absolute power; and from the point of view of monarchs of the Renaissance and after, he would have been a fool, if he had neglected this important bond in uniting the nations he governed. It was not a question as to the internal faith of the ruler; that was a personal matter; but outwardly he must conform to the creed which gave him the greatest political advantages. There is a pretty picture of Napoleon's teaching the rudiments of Christianity to a little child at Saint Helena; but who imagines that he would have hesitated to make the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca or to prostrate himself before the idols of any powerful Pagan nation, if he could have fulfilled his plans in the East? 'Paris vaut une Messe,' said Henry IV. of Navarre and France with the cynicism of his tribe. Queen Catherine di Medici and Queen Elizabeth had their superstitions. They probably believed that all clever people have the same religion, but never tell what it is—the religion to which Lord Beaconsfield thought he belonged. It is against the subversion of religion, of spirituality, to the State that democracy protests. Frankly, it is as much against the despotism of Socialism as it is against the Machiavellianism of His late Imperial Majesty, the German Emperor. He hoped to become Emperor of Germany and the world, and to speak from Berlin urbi et ubi. To be German Emperor did not content him.